Ordinary plain old blog PLUS frequent reflections on "1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die" by Tom Moon (of NPR and other fames)

The other night, at the end of the evening, I started listening to Tea for the Tillerman, in the dark. Joe came in, awake and not so much awake, and got in my bed, and asked when I was going to go to sleep. So, feeling all "Cat's the the Cradle" and the silver spoon, I got in bed too. And I didn't get back to Stevens for a few nights. I've been wandering around in some mighty different stuff at my uncle's suggestion and it's been fun. But tonight I came back to Stevens.

First off: I don't care what he's done since. Stevens is a musician, or at least he was (and is again, the clerk at the local video store tells me), and I am not in the religion or the religion subdivision business. Stevens made music. I used to like it, when I was a teenager and looking for someone to help me feel whole. And it turns out, that all these years gone, I still like the music. A little I felt like I was in the old Ford Escort or, before, the VW Rabbit, but not entirely. (Well, now he's playing "Father and Son" -- I'm not made of stone.)

It's lovely to find the music lasts for me. I remember teachers sneering, or quizzical, asking "Do you REALLY think Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin will last like Mozart?" I remember arguing, yes, this song, but maybe not that one. I remember doing a paper on Mussorgsky and his work, and reflecting that not all of his songs were immortal. I remember saying: We don't know.

Stevens won't last forever, either. He'll peel off when Croce and James Taylor are still audible. Joe probably won't find Stevens in his copy of 1000 Recordings, umpteenth edition, which I hope to buy for him some day. But it's lovely work, precious to hear, and to apply myself to now. I'm more complicated than this music (and so is Yusuf Islam, I hear), and it's wonderful to have the stone to touch again.

[Adding later: Now I remember, too -- I just listened to the first part of this record. Tape. Probably more tape than record. Still like it -- but mostly the first part.]

I'll never be able to write anything that touches this brilliant work. It's like perfect aliens reverse-engineered jazz and extruded the results once then plunged into the sun, satisfied, the happy last of their decadent race.

Over the weekend, while Joe slipped in and out of real fever dreams (he got up to 103 at one point -- the kid runs hot), I slipped in and out of my own, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, the first LP I ever listened to front to back on headphones. I remember sitting and listening to it absolutely all the way, breathing through my mouth with nerves when I flipped the record, as it was (of course) a friend's Dad's stereo, back when the mere existence of two speakers demanded respect -- and the size of the speakers was a a strong indicator of their value.

In fact, I touched the record this time off and on for a week, listening to it for the first time when I saw Rick Wright was dead, then again on the way back from a conference in Los Angeles. I still marvel at the stellar power of "The Great Gig In The Sky," smirk at "Money" (which was what passed for profundity before I had a driver's license), and sit flat on the ground for "Eclipse" and "Breathe" and "Brain Damage." What I wonder at now is that this ever sounded iconoclastic or "bad" (that's "bad" meaning "good"), that it ever seemed like something the good kids wouldn't pick. This is is tame now, and consequently, maybe, more accessible in its most meaningful layers. The lyrics and the samples are more affecting now, drifting up from the time capsule. It's a lovely, sweet document from the vault, a gentle bit of unremarkable poetry from the pens of gentle men who found themselves with a vast stage and a vaster audience.

What it led me back to, via the book, was Tangerine Dream's Rubycon, which I remember buying in a stack of records from Plan 9, along with whatever else was there. I suspect Rubycon had a good review from Dave Marsh, on whom I relied for much of my selections, thanks to a guide my parents had bought me. I liked a fair amount of Tangerine Dream, but not this, if memory serves -- I think I found it "bloodless space music," to quote from memory Marsh's review of Jean-Michel Jarre. And listening to it now, what I hear is much more compelling, but also much weirder. There's a sameness to the layers of sound, an undifferentiated sort of metamorphed thick ambery syrup. It's like there was much more difference when the tracks were laid down, but then they were fused, and now we can only tell there are different tracks because we can see them, but they sound the same. Or we can't see the difference, but we can hear it.

Rubycon doesn't even have the decency to be a concept album -- it's two tracks, Side One and Side Two, and there's no more sense to the division than among the four dual tracks of a stereo 8-track. It's a compelling loop, though, and I found myself treating it like a long walk -- the kind where you're walking a familiar trail and thinking, "right, I remember this bend -- around it is that hill, no, wait, around this bend is the hill, or maybe the next bend, or the one after that, there it is, the hil -- wow, this is a pretty walk." I listened six or seven times in the weekend, which is probably more times than I ever listened to the record when I owned it (bet I didn't get 10 cents for it when I finally let it go -- ebay where wert thy sting?).

Brazilian pop is cool like the cool you feel on sunburn when you slip into the shade of a dune. There's the warmth, this time, there underneath the sudden sweet chill that's only there on the surface. I've been listening to Elis Regina's "Como & porque" for a few cycles, and I'm enchanted as always by the ripply, blissful Brazilian pop sound from the era at hand.

Via my mother, apropos of my toasting the pound cake my father baked me for my birthday: "My favorite dessert was to go to the Dope Shop. [They] would grill the cheap slab of pound cake on the grill for grilled cheeses and add a scoop of ice cream and some chocolate sauce." This was c. 1960, a few years after this picture.

Scott McCloudProbably the best-known thinker about comic strips/books/graphic novels/sequential art working right now. Controversial among comic fans but unequivocally an influential and original thinker.